Jade Levendoski put on her cowboy hat and flipped a switch. A red neon light illuminated the hat, matching the color in Levendoski’s pigtails.

“It looks so good!” Kylie Tsai exclaimed.

Levendoski and Tsai put the finishing touches on their art projects this month at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The two were among nine students who took a summer course called “Neon: Light as Sculpture.”

Tom Zickuhr, a lecturer in the university’s Art Department, has taught the class for more than nine years. Students learn how to bend and shape glass tubing into 3D shapes.

“It’s a very finicky process,” Zickuhr said. “There’s a huge learning curve.”

When people think of neon lights, they likely picture signs at restaurants and gas stations. But “neon has so many possibilities,” Zickuhr said.

UW-Madison created the first collegiate glass program in the United States in 1962, according to the university’s website. Today, a handful of similar academic programs exist across the country, Zickuhr said. What makes UW-Madison’s program unique is “we do everything here ourselves.”

“We create the neon. We bend and blow the glass. But we also process it and turn it into the light form that you see,” Zickuhr said.

As the class wrapped up this month, the students worked on their projects in a dim, warm space in the Art Lofts building, just east of the Kohl Center. The room was so quiet at times that only the roar of flames, created from natural gas and forced air that can reach about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, could be heard.